According to the song, “To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season turn, turn, turn….” That’s surely true for network operator service revenue opportunities, and one thing that all 88 of the operators I talked with this year have made that clear. The biggest problem, according to 57 of the operators is the “challenge…
If you want to raise profit per bit as a network operator, you have to raise revenues, lower costs, or both. For decades, operators enjoyed significant growth in mobile services and even good growth in wireline broadband, which gave them a cushion in terms of profit, but even during that period, profit per bit was…
Everyone believes that virtualization is important. I hear that from all 301 enterprises I’ve chatted with on the topic this year, and all 88 of the network operators. There are really no service providers or enterprises who I think aren’t committed to virtualization, and in multiple ways. It’s also a topic that most buyers (and…
What do enterprises want from their service providers? That’s a question that the service providers are focused on to the point of obsession, and one that’s aroused a lot of speculation among the service planners. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between what these planners are speculating on,…
We don’t seem to be able to shake the topic of cloud-native technology in the telco world. It’s also getting merged with what I think is a more general topic, which is “telco cloud”. As I noted in an earlier blog, I’ve been fiddling with the design of a digital-twinning “metaverse-of-things” software model, and it’s…
Vendors love to put out reports at this time of year, prepping for the new-year budget cycles. For network vendors, there’s the obligatory traffic hockey-stick commentary and an equally obligatory technology trends and product directions piece. Nokia offers this all in their Technology Strategy 2030 release, which includes a reference to their Global Network Traffic…
Over a year ago, I wrote a blog for Network World called “Why it makes sense for Broadcom to buy VMware”. I postulated that VMware might combine with Broadcom-based data center switches to build a bridge between cloud and data center. Suppose, just suppose, they did. What might that mean for the cloud? A lot,…
What do enterprises want from AI? The short answer is “everything”, largely because that’s what enterprises are conditioned to believe is possible. The long answer, of course, is nuanced, complicated, and perhaps in the end even realistic. Not surprisingly, it takes a bit of effort to dig out even the current symptoms of an AI…
I’ve blogged about the way that a “metaverse of things” could provide the impetus for a new set of productivity-enhancing projects that would increase IT spending by increasing benefits. That’s fine for enterprises, but would the same approach (with MoT or something else) work for the network operators? It’s clear that 5G spending is tapering…
Microsoft surprised Wall Street by showing growth in its cloud services. Google disappointed the Street by delivering less cloud growth than they had in the past. Amazon met its growth expectations, which were lower than those of Microsoft and Google. The media and Wall Street have attributed Microsoft’s success to a faster and more aggressive…